The text accompanying Black Velvet If You Please, a retrospective of Dimensionally True paintings at Pasadena's Colorado Wine Company curated by Jeremy Rosenberg:

It is a cliche' among the scholarly that, even as cybertronics, microwaves, and vacuum-sealed foods bring us closer to the image of our maker, we have less need to blame or credit an originator with various lobes, the appendix, the butter-catching philtrum. Instead, we hurtle fearfully, hands across our eyes as if dogs expecting blows, toward a perfection that earlier ages anticipated with joy.

It is with this fear of success that Dr. Lemt Petite-Squirrele (1895-1978) embarked on his collection of velvet paintings in 1940.

"Montezuma sum et edit cioccolatam," the Doctor declared. The Spanish Civil War was over, and on the first anniversary of the Fall of Valencia Mdm. Petite-Squirrele bought her husband a velvet representation of a conquistador.

Every painting in his collection was obtained at a farm stand in Clovis, CA.

"In our lives," he observed, "We add the dimension of wisdom to the dimensions of height and weight. But the wisdom constantly betrays us . It is a false dimension. We seek other ways achieve dimensional truth."

Dimensional Truth, a school of philosophy that would occupy the Petite-Squirreles for the next 30 years (until their deaths in a silage combustion pact), focused on the attached velveteen dimensions that made images of sailing ships, snow scenes, crying children, noble, brutal aboriginal savages, and poppy-fiends "realer," fabrico-anthropologist Jens Burl has written, "and better than those things are when you meet them on the street."

Ethnographers, dowagers, beatniks, astronauts, lesbians, sculptors, the owner of a salmon hatchery, cultural illiterates, men, rustics, production assistants, various laureates, and racetrack sharpies were all of different opinions about the Petite-Squirreles' work. Was it Minor? Worthwhile? Insensitive? "Hot"? Outsider? Incendiary? Provocative? Creamy? Dark?

Before we answer these questions, we need to ask ourselves if we're here for the art or for something else. What is our Dimensional Truth? The cheese in orange and yellow cubes? The toothpicks with cellophane flairs? The wine in plastic cups? Or John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," which is undoubtedly playing right now?

-Martin Barrett, author: "A Nation Rubs Art on Its Face at the Gas Station"

¹That year the Petite-Squirrele farm yielded a bumper crop of prunes rather than raisins. "We wanted plums," the doctor told a reporter for the Fresno Bee And Ant
²If by "different" we can also include the lack of an opinion

Black Velvet If You Please opens Saturday, November 8. More details here.

See also: Colorado Wine Company